Deaf Quotes - Page 8

• Highly technical philosophical arguments of the sort many philosophers favor are absent here. That is because I have a prior problem to deal with. I have learned that arguments, no matter how watertight, often fall on deaf ears. I am myself the author of arguments that I consider rigorous and unanswerable but that are often not such much rebutted or even dismissed as simply ignored.

  Daniel Dennett

  Fall, Philosophical, Atheism

  Daniel C. Dennett (2014). “Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life”, p.12, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• My son, I do not say these are foals and those asses, these little monkeys and those great baboons, as you would have me do. As I told you from the first, I regard them as earth's heroes. But I do not wish to believe them without cause, nor to accept those propositions whose antitheses (as you must have understood if you are not both blind and deaf) are so compellingly true.

  Giordano Bruno

  Believe, Hero, Son

  Giordano Bruno (1962). “Cause, Principle, and Unity: Five Dialogues”

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• The poor lack money. They lack money because they do not know the secret of productive wealth. They know it is possible to be old, unemployed, uneducated, lazy - even halt, deaf, dumb, and blind-and still be excessively rich. But you have to be in on the secret, and the poor by definition are not.

  Louis O. Kelso

  Wisdom, Dumb, Secret

  4 Copy quote

• Despite my mentors advice that I would never go to heaven fishing with a weighted nymph and a float, I took it up. (As an aside, it is now amazing to me how much of the advice from my elders in those days has not come true. I have not gone blind or deaf, despite some early teen advice to the contrary. The only time I was ever involved in a car accident, I was taken to hospital, but no one seemed to take the slightest bit of notice as to whether I had on clean underwear or not. I have, as yet, been unable to test the nymph and heaven advice.)

  Tony Bishop

  Taken, Clean Underwear, Sea

  4 Copy quote

• Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge.

  Igor Stravinsky

  Ignorance, Cutting, Perfect

  18 Copy quote

• Ah, many a one has started forth with hope and purpose high; Has fought throughout a weary life, and passed all pleasure by; Has burst all flowery chains by which men aye have been enthralled; Has been stone-deaf to voices sweet, that softly, sadly called; Has scorned the flashing goblet with the bubbles on its brim; Has turned his back on jewelled hands that madly beckoned him; Has, in a word, condemned himself to follow out his plan By stern and lonely labor--and has died, a conquered man!

  George Arnold

  Lonely, Sweet, Men

  George Arnold (1866). “Drift: A Sea-shore Idyl : and Other Poems”, p.60

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Our Adonais has drunk poisonoh! What deaf and viperous murderer could crown Life's early cup with such a draught of woe?

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Drunk, Crowns, Woe

  1821 Adonais, stanza 36.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• You are now In London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more. Yet in its depth what treasures!

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Sea, Ebb And Flow, Depth

  'Letter to Maria Gisborne' (1820) l. 193

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• We're blind, deaf and dumb. It is only that Self, which is our life force that makes who and what we are. The realization of that is self-realization.

  Frederick Lenz

  Humility, Buddhism, Self

  10 Copy quote

• Who would have guessed that the shots heard 'round the world 225 years ago would fall on deaf ears in a nation now more sympathetic to the gun-grabbing Redcoat than the gun-bearing rebel?

  Michelle Malkin

  Fall, Gun, Years

  12 Copy quote

• The absolutist lays down the law, but the relativist hears only roaring and bawling. Or, when the relativist voice, as it is heard from philosophers such as Nietzsche or James, itself starts to grate and sounds shrill, as it often does, and when the relativist then offers concessions, the absolutist hears only insincerity. The war of words can often turn into a dialogue of the deaf, and this too if part of its power to arouse outrage and fury.

  Simon Blackburn

  War, Law, Voice

  Simon Blackburn (2006). “Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed: A Guide for the Perplexed”, p.20, Penguin UK

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am a little deaf, a little blind, a little important and on top of this are two or three abominable infirmities, but nothing destroys my hope.

  Voltaire

  Attitude, Two, Important

  13 Copy quote

• Some people never learn how to talk to kids. They turn up the volume and enunciate with extra care, as if talking to a partially deaf immigrant. They sound as if they're reading lines somebody else wrote for them, or as if what they're saying is really for the benefit of other adults listening and not just for the child. Kids sense that and turn off.

  F. Paul Wilson

  Children, Reading, Kids

  7 Copy quote

• The fundamentalist believer is mostly a weird intellectual who often lacks real faith altogether. As a self-appointed attorney for God, who is in no need of attorneys, he very easily turns out to be more godless than the agnostic and the unbeliever. At all events, he seems deaf to poetry.

  Steve Allen

  Real, Self, Intellectual

  Steve Allen (1993). “More Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion and Morality”

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• It was intimidating to play a deaf character. There's a whole culture in the deaf community and I really wanted to know a lot about that and honor it in the work.

  Piper Perabo

  Character, Play, Community

  "Piper Perabo’s Culinary Affairs". Interview with Emma Brown, www.interviewmagazine.com. March 16, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• You read statistics all the time like, "13 million people are at risk because of the severe drought in East Africa," but I think those kinds of numbers fall on deaf ears - there's so much devastation in the world, that it's a bit overwhelming for people.

  Scarlett Johansson

  Fall, Thinking, Numbers

  Interview with Arianna Huffington, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 22, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The same men who are blind and deaf to feminism are acutely sensitive to what threatens their dominance and privilege.

  Marilyn French

  Men, Feminism, Dominance

  26 Copy quote

• My girlfriend and I went to a dinner party the other night and we ended up playing charades. There was another couple there that was deaf. They were so good.

  Zach Galifianakis

  Funny, Girlfriend, Couple

  14 Copy quote

• Current Catholic worship often ignores the essential connection between truth and beauty, body and soul, at the center of the Catholic worldview. The Church requires that we be faithful, but must we also be deaf, dumb, and blind? I deserve to suffer for my sins, but must so much of that punishment take place in church?

  Dana Gioia

  Punishment, Catholic, Dumb

  "The Catholic Writer Today". www.firstthings.com. December 2013.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• We try to evade the question of existence with property, prestige, power, possession, production, fun, and, ultimately, by trying to forget that we- that I- exist. No matter how much he thinks of God or goes to church, or how much he believes in religious ideas , if he, the whole man, is deaf to the question of existence, if he does not have an answer to it, he is marking time, and he lives and dies like one of the million things he produces. He thinks of God, instead of experiencing God.

  Erich Fromm

  Wisdom, Religious, Fun

  31 Copy quote

• The private citizen today has come to feel rather like a deaf spectator in the back row, who ought to keep his mind on the mystery off there, but cannot quite manage to keep awake. He knows he is somehow affected by what is going on. Rules and regulations continually, taxes annually and wars occasionally remind him that he is being swept along by great drifts of circumstance. Yet these public affairs are in no convincing way his affairs. They are for the most part invisible. They are managed, if they are managed at all, at distant centers, from behind the scenes, by unnamed powers.

  Walter Lippmann

  War, Mind, Behind The Scenes

  Walter Lippmann, Clinton Rossiter, James Lare (1982). “The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy”, p.35, Harvard University Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Nature hav no music; nor would ther be for theeany better melody in the April woods at dawnthan what an old stone-deaf labourer, lying awakeo'night in his comfortless attic, might perchancebe aware of, when the rats run amok in his thatch?

  Robert Bridges

  Running, Lying, Night

  4 Copy quote

• Is not the real experience of each individual very limited? And, if a writer dwells upon that solely or principally, is he not in danger of repeating himself, and also of becoming an egotist? Then, too, imagination is a strong, restless faculty, which claims to be heard and exercised: are we to be quite deaf to her cry, and insensate to her struggles? When she shows us bright pictures, are we never to look at them, and try to reproduce them? And when she is eloquent, and speaks rapidly and urgently in our ear, are we not to write to her dictation?

  Charlotte Bronte

  Strong, Real, Struggle

  Charlotte Brontë “Jane Eyre”, W. W. Norton & Company

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• His (Deschamps') complaint of court life was the same as is made of government at the top in any age: it was composed of hypocrisy, flattery, lying, paying and betraying; it was where calumny and cupidity reigned, common sense lacked, truth dared not appear, and where to survive one had to be deaf, blind, and dumb.

  Barbara Tuchman

  Lying, Government, Common Sense

  Barbara Tuchman (2017). “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century”, p.539, Penguin UK

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• All too willingly man sees himself as the centre of the universe, as something not belonging to the rest of nature but standing apart as a different and higher being. Many people cling to this error and remain deaf to the wisest command ever given by a sage, the famous "Know thyself" inscribed in the temple of Delphi.

  Konrad Lorenz

  Men, Errors, People

  Konrad Lorenz (2005). “On Aggression”, p.99, Routledge

  116 Copy quote

  Show source